It is not a complete explanation of the development of the subjugation of the female sex to say, as Ti-Grace Atkinson does, that men solved the biological mystery of procreation. In fact they did not and have not solved the mystery of paternity. It is known that a father is necessary, but not known how to identify him, except negatively. Women have freely counteracted this disability of paternity by offering, after perhaps initially being forced by incarceration and supervision to offer, guarantees of paternity and its concomitant, fidelity. Now that cloistering of wives is an impossibility, we might as well withdraw the guarantees, and make the patriarchal family an inpossibility by insisting on preserving the paternity of the whole group—all men are fathers to all children. The withdrawal of the guarantee of paternity does not necessarily involve ‘promiscuity’, although in its initial stages it might appear to. The promiscuity of casual secretaries in choosing their employment can work as a revolutionary measure, forcing recognition of their contributions to the firm and its work; likewise, the unwillingness of women to commit themselves with pledges of utter monogamy and doglike devotion might have to be buttressed by actual ‘promiscuity’ to begin with.
All that is good and commendable now existing would continue to exist if all marriage laws were repealed tomorrow…I have an inalienable constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please!
Victoria Claflin Woodhull, 20 November 1871
Women must also reject their role as principal consumers in the capitalist state. Although it would be a retrogressive step to refuse to buy household appliances in that women’s work would be increased and become more confining than it need be, it would be a serious blow to the industries involved if women shared, say, one washing machine between three families, and did not regard the possession of the latest model as the necessary index of prestige and success. They could form household cooperatives, sharing their work about, and liberating each other for days on end. Their children instead of being pitted against one another could be encouraged to share the toys that lie discarded as soon as they are sick of them. This would not be so repugnant to children as parents hope. I can recall being beaten for giving away all my toys when I was about four. I really didn’t want them any more. Children do not need expensive toys, and women could reject the advertising that seeks to draw millions of pounds out of them each Christmas. Some of the mark-up on soap powders and the like could be avoided by buying unbranded goods in bulk and resisting the appeal of packaging. In the same way food can be bought in direct from the suppliers, and if women combine to cheat the middlemen they have an even better chance of making it work. ‘Cheaper by the dozen’ does not have to be limited to one family. Women ought also to get over the prejudice attaching to second-hand clothes and goods. The clothes children grow out of can be shared about and if children weren’t already victims of oversell they wouldn’t mind. Baby carriages and the like are already swapped around in most working-class families. Part of the aim of these cooperative enterprises is to break down the isolation of the single family and of the single parent, but principally I am considering ways to short-circuit the function of the women as chief fall-guys for advertising, chief spenders of the nation’s loot.
Most women would find it hard to abandon any interest in clothes and cosmetics, although many women’s liberation movements urge them to transcend such servile fripperies. As far as cosmetics are used for adornment in a conscious and creative way, they are not emblems of inauthenticity: it is when they are presented as the real thing, covering unsightly blemishes, disguising a repulsive thing so that it is acceptable to the world that their function is deeply suspect. The women who dare not go out without their false eyelashes are in serious psychic trouble. The most expensive preparations in the cosmetic line are no different in essence from the cheapest; no miraculous unguents can actually repair failing tissue. It is as well to consider diet and rest for the raw materials of beauty, and use cosmetics strictly for fun. The cheapest and some of the best fun are the colours used on the stage in greasepaint. Kohl is the best eye make-up, and the cheapest, and can be bought in various forms. Instead of the expensive extracts of coal marketed with French labels, women could make their own perfumes with spirit of camphor, and oil of cloves and frankincense, as well as crumbled lavender, patchouli and attar of roses. Instead of following the yearly changes of hairstyle, women could find the way their hair grows best and keep it that way, working the possible changes according to their own style and mood, instead of coiffing themselves in a shape ordained by fashion but not by their heads.
Some of these trends are already apparent. Most young girls do not inhabit the hairdressers anything like as much as their mothers do. They have vanquished the couturier singlehanded and wear whatever they please, from the oldest and most romantic to the most crass adaptations of men’s sporting gear. There are signs that they are abandoning prestige eating habits as well, especially alcohol and the wine game. Many of them are finding ways of survival as students that they will not abandon as grown women. The pattern of rejection of cigarettes and beer for illicit marijuana has far-reaching effects for the economy if it is taken up on any large scale. The taste for macrobiotic food and much less of it reflects both an attitude to eating and to the marketing of food. So far only a minority is following such trends, but it is a much larger minority than we find trumpeting behind the banners of women’s liberation. Yet it is liberation that they are seeking, just the same. The hippie rejection of violence may be considered to have failed, for policemen were not ashamed to respond to a flower with a baton, but the question has been defined and the debate is not over yet.
The chief means of liberating women is replacing of compulsiveness and compulsion by the pleasure principle. Cooking, clothes, beauty, and housekeeping are all compulsive activities in which the anxiety quotient has long since replaced the pleasure or achievement quotient. It is possible to use even cooking, clothes, cosmetics and housekeeping for fun. The essence of pleasure is spontaneity. In these cases spontaneity means rejecting the norm, the standard that one must live up to, and establishing a self-regulating principle. The analogy is best understood in the case of drugs: women use drugs as anodynes, compulsively, to lessen tension, pain, or combat anxiety symptoms, entering almost automatically into a dependence syndrome so that it becomes impossible to discern whether the drug caused the symptom for which the drug was taken, and so it goes on. The person who uses marijuana has no need to do so: he uses it when he wants to feel in a certain way, and stops his intake when he is at the point that he wants to be at. He is not tempted to excuse his use as a kind of therapy, although regulations about the use of cannabis are trying to force some such construction of the situation. In the same way, it ought to be possible to cook a meal that you want to cook, that everybody wants to eat, and to serve it in any way you please, instead of following a timetable, serving Tuesday’s meal or the tastefully varied menu of all new and difficult dishes you have set yourself as a new cross, and if you simply cannot feel any interest in it, not to do it. Unfortunately the ideology of routine is strongly established in this country, and even deliquent housewives use their bingo and their stout as a routine, that ‘they don’t know what they would do without’. Housework is admitted to be a typical vicious circle; work makes more work and it goes on. It is so difficult to break such a circle that it seems almost essential to break right out of it, and insist on doing something else altogether. Regular periods of ‘freedom’ are still contained within the circle, and this is why they won’t work. Most forms of compromise will not do the job, although they may alleviate symptoms of strain temporarily. For the same reason, incorporating some self-chosen work in the circle will not work in so far as incentive and energy are constantly being vitiated. There is no alternative but rupture of the circle.
For my arguments, Sir, are debated by a disinterested Spirit—I plead for my sex, not for myself. Independence I have lo
ng considered the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue—and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.
Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792, p. iv
For some the rupture of the circle has meant that the centre cannot hold and chaos is come upon the world. The fear of liberty is strong in us, but the fear itself must be understood to be one of the factors inbuilt in the endurance of the status quo. Once women refuse to accept the polarity of masculine-feminine they must accept the existence of risk and possibility of error. Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them. There have been women in the past far more daring than we would need to be now, who ventured all and gained a little, but survived after all. Vociferous women are guyed in the press and sneered at by others who collect a fat pay-packet and pride themselves on femininity as well, but at least they are no longer burnt. It is too much to expect that women who have set out to liberate themselves should become healthy, happy, creative and cooperative as if by magic, although generally the more appalling symptoms of depersonalization do disappear. The old conditioned needs and anxieties linger on, continuing to exact their toll, but now they are understood for what they are and borne for a purpose. The situation will only emerge in all its ramifications when it is challenged, and women might initially be horrified at the swiftness with which police forget their scruples about hitting women, or the vileness of the abuse which is flung at them, but such discoveries can only inspire them more doggedly to continue. The key to the strategy of liberation lies in exposing the situation, and the simplest way to do it is to outrage the pundits and the experts by sheer impudence of speech and gesture, the exploitation of cliché ‘feminine logic’ to expose masculine pomposity, absurdity and injustice. Women’s weapons are traditionally their tongues, and the principal revolutionary tactic has always been the spread of information. Now as before, women must refuse to be meek and guileful, for truth cannot be served by dissimulation. Women who fancy that they manipulate the world by pussy power and gentle cajolery are fools.4 It is slavery to have to adopt such tactics.
It is difficult at this point to suggest what a new sexual regime would be like. We have but one life to live, and the first object is to find a way of salvaging that life from the disabilities already inflicted on it in the service of our civilization. Only by experimentation can we open up new possibilities which will indicate lines of development in which the status quo is a given term. Women’s revolution is necessarily situationist: we cannot argue that all will be well when the socialists have succeeded in abolishing private property and restoring public ownership of the means of production. We cannot wait that long. Women’s liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let’s get on with it. Let the men distribute leaflets in factories where the proletariat have become hire-purchase slaves instead of communists. The existence of hire-purchase slaves is also based upon the function of the wife as a stay-at-home consumer. Statistics show that almost all hire-purchase contracts are entered into by married people. If women revolt, that situation must change too. Women represent the most oppressed class of life-contracted unpaid workers, for whom slaves is not too melodramatic a description. They are the only true proletariat left, and they are by a tiny margin the majority of the population, so what’s stopping them? The answer must be made, that their very oppression stands in the way of their combining to form any kind of solid group which can challenge the masters. But man made one grave mistake: in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilization and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin. We need not challenge anyone to open battle, for the most effective method is simply to withdraw our cooperation in building up a system which oppresses us, the valid withdrawal of our labour. We may also agitate hither and thither, picket segregated bars and beauty competitions, serve on committees, invade the media, do, in short, what we want, but we must also refuse, not only to do some things, but to want to do them.
Experience is too costly a teacher: we cannot all marry in order to investigate the situation. The older sisters must teach us what they found out. At all times we must learn from each other’s experience, and not judge hastily or snobbishly, or according to masculine criteria. We must fight against the tendency to form a feminist elite, or a masculine-type hierarchy of authority in our own political structures, and struggle to maintain cooperation and the matriarchal principle of fraternity. It is not necessary for feminists to prove that matriarchy is a prehistoric form of community, or that patriarchy is a capitalist perversion in order to justify our policies, because the form of life we envisage might as well be completely new as inveterately ancient. We need not buy dubious anthropology to explain ourselves, although women with a studious bent might do well to research the historic role of women in some attempt to delimit our concepts of the natural and the possible in the female sphere. The time has come when some women are ready to listen, and their number is growing; it is time also for those women to speak, however uncertainly, however haltingly, and for the world to listen.
The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed. For a long time there may be no perceptible reward for women other than their new sense of purpose and integrity. Joy does not mean riotous glee, but it does mean the purposive employment of energy in a self-chosen enterprise. It does mean pride and confidence. It does mean communication and cooperation with others based on delight in their company and your own. To be emancipated from helplessness and need and walk freely upon the earth that is your birthright. To refuse hobbles and deformity and take possession of your body and glory in its power, accepting its own laws of loveliness. To have something to desire, something to make, something to achieve, and at last something genuine to give. To be freed from guilt and shame and the tireless self-discipline of women. To stop pretending and dissembling, cajoling and manipulating, and begin to control and sympathize. To claim the masculine virtues of magnanimity and generosity and courage. It goes much further than equal pay for equal work, for it ought to revolutionize the conditions of work completely. It does not understand the phrase ‘equality of opportunity’, for it seems that the opportunities will have to be utterly changed and women’s souls changed so that they desire opportunity instead of shrinking from it. The first significant discovery we shall make as we racket along our female road to freedom is that men are not free, and they will seek to make this an argument why nobody should be free. We can only reply that slaves enslave their masters, and by securing our own manumission we may show men the way that they could follow when they have jumped off their own treadmill. Privileged women will pluck at your sleeve and seek to enlist you in the ‘fight’ for reforms, but reforms are retrogressive. The old process must be broken, not made new. Bitter women will call you to rebellion, but you have too much to do. What will you do?
Establishment of Truth depends on destruction of Falsehood continually,
On Circumcision, not on Virginity, O Reasoners of Albion!
Blake, ‘Jerusalem’, p. 55, pl. 65-6
…among the disbelievers of revealed religion I have not found during a life of half a century, a single opponent to the doctrine of equal rights for males and females.
Long, ‘Eve’, 1875, p. 112
Notes
SUMMARY
1. ‘Boadicea Rides Again’, Sunday Times Magazine, 21.9.1969.
2. Ibsen, A Doll’s House, Act III.
GENDER
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br /> 1. The embodiment of anthropological and ethnological prejudice is the stupendous three-volume study of H. H. Ploss and M. and P. Bartels; the plates of the original German edition were destroyed by Hitler, but not before Dr Eric Dingwall had prepared an English version, Woman (London, 1935). Hereinafter it is referred to as Ploss and Bartels.
2. F. A. E. Crew, Sex Determination (London, 1954), p. 54.
3. Ashley Montagu, The Natural Superiority of Women (London, 1954), pp. 76-81.
4. The Cropwood Conference on Criminological Implications of Chromosomal Abnormalities, held at the University of Cambridge in the summer of 1969, discussed this matter at length. The bibliography on the XYY syndrome now reaches upwards of 500 titles.
5. Gray’s Anatomy (London, 1958), pp. 219-20.
6. Robert Stoller, Sex and Gender (London, 1968), passim.
BONES
1. See for example Joan Fraser, Stay a Girl (London, 1963), p. 3:
A woman needs a different type of exercise from a man. He needs movements aimed at developing his physical strength and hardening his muscles, but a woman does not want hard muscles. She needs a non-fatiguing form of exercise, movement which refreshes and relaxes her. One which, besides toning up her muscles, joints, glands, respiratory and digestive organs, will give her everyday movements a grace, litheness and poise which enhance her femininity.
2. The pedomorphism of women has always been remarked upon, e.g. by Bichat in his General Anatomy (London, 1824), and of course by Ploss and Bartels (op. cit., p. 90), but these commentators did not see that it might prove to be an advantage as did W. I. Thomas in Sex and Society (London, 1907), pp. 18, 51, and Ashley Montagu (op. cit., pp. 70—71).
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